"Are you a Good book, or a Bad book?" "Please, ma'am, I'm not a book at all!"

I should have posted about The DaVinci Code a long time ago.

Now, I like a good religious controversy any day of the week. The Satanic Verses, The Conversion of the Jews, Dogma, Paradise Lost...if organized religion experiences some sort of pratfall, I point and laugh.

So it stood to reason that The DaVinci Code, with its CruciFiction story, conspiracy theories, cryptography and HOLY-SHIT-RENAISSANCE-ARTWORK!!! would zoom to the top of my favorites list.

Instead this is what I read:

"eneladgaM yraM deirram suseJ," painted Leonardo DaVinci stealthily.
"Merci! What zoes zis mean?" gasped the sexy (but smart) female French cryptographer breathlessly.
"I'm not sure, but it seems to imply that Jesus married Mary Magdalene," pondered Tom Hanks ponderously.

In other words, 450 pages of two dimensional characters running around France, trying to solve a Ditch Day Fake that was thrown together at the last minute (between an Art 108 paper and a Ma 121 set). A Fake Stack that no post-Renaissance conspiracy theorist has been able to solve, and yet consists in large part of Mirror Writing.

And America fell in love with it.

Egads, if you want to feel naughty about reading Apocrypha, there's better stuff around. If you want to learn about the real controversies surrounding the history of the Church, there's better stuff around. If you want to read a best-seller, there's better stuff around (okay, never mind). But enough with the weak pablum that passes itself off as a meaningful examination of controversial Church history.

"Are you a Good book, or a Bad book?" "Please, ma'am, I'm not a book at all!"

I should have posted about The DaVinci Code a long time ago.

Now, I like a good religious controversy any day of the week. The Satanic Verses, The Conversion of the Jews, Dogma, Paradise Lost...if organized religion experiences some sort of pratfall, I point and laugh.

So it stood to reason that The DaVinci Code, with its CruciFiction story, conspiracy theories, cryptography and HOLY-SHIT-RENAISSANCE-ARTWORK!!! would zoom to the top of my favorites list.

Instead this is what I read:

"eneladgaM yraM deirram suseJ," painted Leonardo DaVinci stealthily.
"Merci! What zoes zis mean?" gasped the sexy (but smart) female French cryptographer breathlessly.
"I'm not sure, but it seems to imply that Jesus married Mary Magdalene," pondered Tom Hanks ponderously.

In other words, 450 pages of two dimensional characters running around France, trying to solve a Ditch Day Fake that was thrown together at the last minute (between an Art 108 paper and a Ma 121 set). A Fake Stack that no post-Renaissance conspiracy theorist has been able to solve, and yet consists in large part of Mirror Writing.

And America fell in love with it.

Egads, if you want to feel naughty about reading Apocrypha, there's better stuff around. If you want to learn about the real controversies surrounding the history of the Church, there's better stuff around. If you want to read a best-seller, there's better stuff around (okay, never mind). But enough with the weak pablum that passes itself off as a meaningful examination of controversial Church history.